jerrysheppy

Vader's maps are, unquestionably, standouts but there are really only one or two maps in zpack that aren't decent ZDoom efforts (especially for the day in which they were released). Anybody conveying the impression that ZPack needed to be 'redeemed' by Vader's maps is someone you shouldn't pay any attention to. To the topic of the thread, I can't think of anything. I agree with the gist of what some people have said, that a megawad with 1-2 excellent maps and the rest garbage is not a megawad that has been somehow "redeemed". I think maybe you could phrase it as one or two maps figuratively justifying the existence of an otherwise unremarkable wad, but "redeemed" to me implies that the work as a whole has been somehow elevated, when that's not actually how it works—all the garbage maps are still going to be garbage!

Relative to 1993, definitely. Relative to even the late 1990s let alone the 00s, I don't think so. Any individual player will of course have to get gud at some point, just like there's a first time for everyone learning to write a bicycle, and also there will always be difficulty outliers that aren't intended to be played by anyone remotely close to the median player. But I think that the difficulty curve for, if you will, "mainstream" Doom maps has been mostly flat since at least the time of AV/DV etc.—at least, compared to the transformation that happened over the course of the mid-90s.

I am genuinely curious how you expect anyone to be able to help you when you've specified absolutely nothing about the actual problem you're encountering.

Quickloading lets you learn to beat an encounter by replaying the parts of it you're having trouble with. Restarting the map lets you... learn to beat an encounter by replaying the parts of it you're having trouble with. The question is just how much of a time and frustration tax one wishes to pay in order to learn whatever lesson one needs to learn. Unless one is getting down to TAS-level use of savestates, saving and loading don't alter whatever degree of mechanical skill you need to acquire in order to not eat that cyberdemon rocket or whatever. It's not even clear to me that they alter the RNG factor the way savescumming would in some games, because of how Doom's "RNG" works, though I'm not an expert so I stand to be technically corrected on this point.

That's funny, because I disagree with chuds being able to pull out the "political discrimination!!" card to evade any accountability for the odious contents of their souls, and I'm glad that, at least in this single and limited instance, the good guys aren't having any of it. "Unity", as used in this case, seems to mean that the decent folks are being asked to unilaterally avert their eyes from the moral dumpster fire blazing merrily on the other side. Why is the onus on Scuba Steve, Esselfortium, et al. to do this? Why not ask the DB to advance the cause of "unity" by repudiating the repulsive ideological leanings that have come to be associated with that site?

The shamefully under-mentioned DavidXNewton is my favorite Doom youtuber, as in, my favorite person who happens to be a Doom youtuber. If I'm being honest, though, decino and mtpain27 have a better hit/miss rate for me in terms of individual gameplay videos. This is substantially due to the fact that David's brand leans more towards playing rough newbie maps than, you know, good ones, whereas the other two will show off maps that are actually fun to see (decino's often-cringey 'viewer submitted' videos notwithstanding). In terms of Doom development videos, DavidN is once again right up there, along with chubzdoomer and doomkid.

So which demon is Chris Tucker and which one is Jackie Chan?

I've had a night to sleep on it, and I want to elaborate my position a bit more, because, to be clear, in no way do I think it's a bad thing if the mind of a single would-be Nazi happens to get changed and they realize "hey, maybe this isn't actually me." And the way you did it is pretty close to exactly the way it should be done: being casually and unapologetically inclusive and appreciative of Jews (and every other sort of non-evil person), offering an enticing view of a more positive world to those who want it and leaving the actually evil folks with the sole option to go fuck themselves and die. But I think that doing it with the specific, individual intention of "oh, I just need to reach out to this guy and change his mind" is philosophically and practically perilous. There's a very real danger in normalizing this implicit narrative that all you have to do to address the threat of Nazis is to educate them or talk to them. The reason why I say there's a danger is because it delays, or diverts, people's time and effort away from actual constructive action, and can lead them to thinking a problem is being addressed when it's not. Also, it has the potential to, even if only unconsciously, shift the responsibility away from where it could be. If the narrative (again, possibly only implicit and/or unconscious) is that people are nazis because someone hasn't been nice to them in just the right way yet, then suddenly the next implication, in turn, is that being a nazi might be the fault of anyone except the nazi themselves; the burden, in other words, might be on those who are already being targeted and victimized by hate, or their allies. Which, uh, no. I'm certainly not saying you (EraserheadBaby) were deliberately trying to push that narrative, but you may have unconsciously bought into it at some point along the line. Yes, educating those who can be educated is good. But nazis, and for that matter everyone else, are (in the general, societal case) already absolutely drenched in sources of education or communication. People don't need to hear that 2 + 2 = 4; they need to actually have a desire inside themselves to put 2 and 2 together.

I unfortunately(?) don't have any anecdotes that bear as directly and personally on this sort of case as yours, sorry! In any case, I apologize if I misunderstood your intent in making this post—it seemed to me like you were trying to imply that this sort of encounter was worthy of serious consideration as a vehicle for social change, or even just for individual change. Which makes it valid to ask the question of how broadly useful it's actually likely to be. But if I missed the mark in my evaluation, then mea culpa, I suppose.

How representative do you think your anecdote is likely to be of the wider world of social communication? Slightly more snarkily put: How many people are there in 2023 who are just waiting to have their minds blown by the completely new informational input that Being A Nazi Is Bad, Actually?

1993 DOS shareware, on my parents' 486.

For the record, in my own post up this page I wasn't really responding directly to the OP's question, more just putting my oar into the general philosophical discussion. So I'll now address the specific questions with which OP opened. 1) Yes. 2) Very little.

I think that there is quite possibly something that some people "have" and some don't when it comes to Doom mapping. However, I'm somewhat less inclined to believe that it would be any sort of specific mechanical skill or knack for a particular sort of cognitive processing. I'm certain that some Doom mappers are able to render a breathlessly detailed scene in their mind's eye and then transfer it into UDB, and that this informs their workflow, but I also know at least one excellent Doom mapper who has near-complete aphantasia (look it up, it's interesting!) and somehow manages to achieve jaw-slackeningly wonderful work. So I don't think that the particular sorts of brain faculties you have are that important, in the final analysis. Rather, I think what's much more important is an overall ethos and motivation, and this is something that cuts across any type of creative medium. Whether it's fiction, visual art, musical composition, or indeed Doom mapping, there are some people who don't seem to hold themselves to any sort of adult standard in creative endeavors, and it shows. All this is not to say that how your brain is wired makes no difference whatsoever -- you'll get there by different roads, and it may well be that a map which takes a Jimmy-esque savant a week to make will take another mapper a month. But the end product should be equally good in both cases, and neither party can get there without investing X amount of creative wherewithal, regardless of its form. Less verbosely put:

I know that the "nothing, lol capitalism" tier responses are low-hanging fruit, but in all seriousness, under the capitalist system as it stands today there would almost assuredly be serious consequences for them, if for no other reason than that a demon invasion would tend to make just about everyone else's investments go to shit right quick. Try getting people to renew their Amazon Prime when the distribution center has been turned into a gothic fortress with flayed bodies hanging from the spires. Of course, it's a fictional setting, and whoever's hitting the crack pipe for the latest incarnation of the Doom "lore" can make it arbitrarily farther along the way to dystopia. The answer to why any fictional dystopia is the way it is, is because it suited the writer's purpose. edit: To draw a distinction, if we suppose that there was only an invasion in a Mars/Martian moon base, it's much more likely that they'd escape any corporate consequences. But in at least two-thirds of the Doom series' continuities, the Martian invasion is followed by a cataclysmic invasion of Earth, so that's what I've been going off of.

I'm pretty sure absorbing the water is exactly the opposite of what a duck's feathers are supposed to do

I'm pretty sure Doomworld used to host the pages of individuals in that fashion. I'm unsure if that service has actually been discontinued for new users or if it's just that there are better options these days so nobody bothers. So the answer, if I'm right, would be yes in a sense. He has it because he was an "OG Doomer", but not because of some special honor, rather just because he was around during the era in question.

I am legitimately wondering if people who complain about Barons have some sort of ADHD or ADHD-adjacent condition where needing to spend a few seconds longer fighting any given enemy sends them into an agony of boredom. How much of your life do you spend shooting three rockets into a hell knight? How much worse is it to shoot two more? Are you really that miserable in Doom's admittedly simplistic player-vs-monster combat, to the point that spending slightly longer at a given encounter is some sort of punishment visited upon you by an angry god? I'm not saying I've never seen Barons used poorly. The places I've encountered where Barons were misused tend to be in situations that are so cramped or otherwise tightly tuned that a couple of extra seconds actually do make the difference between acceptable combat dynamics and unfun bullshit. But the unfun is because the Baron's extra HP actually gets me unfairly killed, not because I have to wait for my weapon to cycle a few extra times. Which ironically seems 180 degrees opposite to your implication that putting Barons in tight quarters would be a good use, which in turn makes it even harder for me to empathize with whatever point you have.

I feel like I'd be pretty sus of a switch with an extremely prominent grate on the floor, right where I'd need to be standing to press the switch.

Ahh, I do pretty much all my mapping in GZDoom/UDMF format so that might explain the discrepancy in our experiences.

I'm sad we never got a proper sequel. It was so bizarre to me how the author decided to turn the sequel into a standalone game that looked like complete garbage (or at least it did at the stage I saw it in; I'm not sure if it ever became anything good, but I would have thought I'd hear of it if it did...). You'd think from the original Unloved that the guy had some creative bona fides, and then they decided that that was what they wanted to put out there as a sequel.

Yes, I understand what you are speaking of, I'm pretty sure. I'm saying that this continues to work, unabated, for me.

I've had that serendipitous sort of thing happen, where you decide to do something while mapping and then realize shortly afterwards how it also solves some other, apparently unrelated, problem you were having. Or, doesn't even need to be a "problem", just something that works out neatly. It's a good feel.

I think the answer is that we don't have enough information to say. It's possible to imagine someone who nominally has access to good dental care and proper information, but just never brushes their teeth because they're lazy and dgaf. It's possible to imagine someone who is economically and socially disadvantaged, who literally can't consistently afford a toothbrush and toothpaste (or has no safe place to buy them)—let alone clinical dental care. It's possible to imagine someone who is reasonably conscientious about brushing their teeth, but is bulimic and so still has a massive net amount of tooth damage coming in. It's possible to imagine someone whose teeth are fucked up due to some congenital condition, for which there was never going to be any remedy beyond replacement. Without more information (and no, "has access to chocolate" does not narrow the field that much, aside from perhaps eliminating some of the possibilities that assume economic destitution) we really cannot say. I suppose this is one of those cases where I'm being silly for putting one or two orders of magnitude more thought into the question than OP did, but it's still an important point to make—"I need more information to make this assessment" is something that everyone ought to be able to identify for themselves.

For whatever it may be worth, ctrl-shift-c and ctrl-shift-v continue to work as they always have for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My UDB is fully updated.

Sorry, I finished it off. You'll have to get your own :(